Modelling cognitive control in task switching and ageing

In an attempt to better understand the reasons for old-age effects on task switching performance, we fitted a quantitative model (Meiran, 2000a) to results from an experiment comparing young and elderly participants. Modelling results indicate that the most pronounced effect of old age was in what can be broadly defined as the duration of the response selection. In addition, compared to young participants, the elderly tended to rely on learning from the preceding trial, which improved their performance in single-task conditions but impaired it when the tasks switched frequently. Relatively modest effects of old age were found in the ability to selectively attend to the task relevant stimulus dimension and on the duration of processing stages preceding or following response selection.